News Release

STEPHANY GRIFFITH-JONES, sgj2108 at columbia.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews, Stephany Griffith-Jones is Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. With José Antonio Ocampo and Joseph E. Stiglitz she co-edited Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis. She said today: “It was irresponsible for a country with the world reserve currency to act in this manner, so it’s a relief that this is over in the immediate. But such a crisis gives an impetus for reforms like a global currency that typically have in the past seemed a bit utopian, and now sound more realistic; you could for example develop much more the role of the SDR, [the IMF’s special drawing rights], which is a currency already in use based on a basket of currencies.”

WILLIAM K. BLACK, blackw at umkc.edu
Black is now an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. See the recent segment “Another Grand Betrayal in the Works?” on The Real News, where he appears regularly. Black just wrote the piece “The Tea Party’s Tactical Brilliance and Strategic Incompetence.”

GERALD EPSTEIN, gepstein at econs.umass.edu
Professor of economics and a founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Epstein said today: “In a sense, this is kicking the can down the road, but it keeps the sequester in play. Noteworthy that the Democrats can stand firm and prevent a kind of blackmail and somewhat responsible people have not lost a total grip on the Congress, but there’s no attempt to solve any of the actual problems: high unemployment, cutbacks in key government services, global warming and so on.”